Currently on Lemmy, when a comment is deleted by its creator, all of the replies to that comment become “hidden”. If I know who replied, and I go to their profile, I can still see the replies. The count of the number of comments indicated next to the post also includes the “hidden” replies. However, the replies to the deleted comment do not appear in the post. On Reddit, if a comment is deleted by its creator, it remains in the post with comment deleted by creator or something like that, and all of the replies to thatcomment remain visible in the post. Is there a way to do this on Lemmy?
This really depends on the subreddit/community
Some people like to delete their comments for privacy, because they want to move instances, etc. It doesn’t make sense to have that remove entire chains of comments with it. I also don’t think people intend for that to happen when deleting comments.
Mods should have a “nuke thread” button to autoremove all child comments when there’s a mess like you said. Users shouldn’t have that ability, even if they intended for that in the first place
This was the reason for this post. It has happened to me quite a few times already. When I take a bunch of time to make a well-thought-out reply and link a bunch of references in a discussion, I don’t want all that effort to effectively disappear when the original commentor just decides they are embarrassed or don’t want to continue and just nukes the thread.
Edit: typos